We may have dodged a full-on catastrophe and can merrily resume our lives, confident bad things only happen to bad people or unlucky people, and Ukiah has neither.

While the flames are taking out Redding and we sit mesmerized at TV reports of the acres scorched and the houses destroyed, the lives and dollars lost, we tell ourselves and our friends that we ought to have made better preparations for emergencies like this. We ought to have scraped a firebreak half a mile wide. We ought to have done the kind of control burning the forestry department used to do.

Another way of saying this is to say we ought to go back to managing our forests the way we did before hysterical hippies came to Ukiah and demanded a bunch of idiotic changes based on childish notions and do-good policies.

In days of yore (pre-1975) California and other western states routinely performed control burns to rid forests of combustible vegetation. This dried up stuff—-old dead trees, sticks, leaves and weeds—makes terrific fuel for fire and isn’t good for much else.

But the back-to-the-land college kids arrived and began explaining their novel theories to old-time ranchers, foresters, and most of all, to the politicians. The problem, said the hippies, was that burning piles of dried branches spelled doom and destruction for a squirrel’s house. Or nest. Whatever. Furthermore, burning was pretty much the same as clear-cutting, a phrase newcomers thought of as the equivalent of genocide.

Trees were noble, sacred creatures and deserved our protection. Setting a controlled burn meant trees would suffer and endangered mosquito habitats would be destroyed, along with my marijuana patch.

So the politicians, ever-mindful of the potential voting power of the hippie hordes, agreed that state firefighting teams be allowed to do controlled burns only inside their homes. Any fires in actual forests, they explained, could harm dolphins and polar bears.

The result? Well, there’s no half-mile wide firebreak on the backside of Cow Mountain is there? And there’s nothing stopping a conflagration in Comptche from lighting up Ukiah, although it would take at least 15 minutes to get here, depending on the winds, which would give everyone plenty of time to evacuate.

Oh wait. No, we wouldn’t be able to evacuate because local morons also don’t like highway construction so we can’t build a road, or even a couple lanes, to facilitate traffic out of town when a big hot one hits Ukiah. Remember the irrational fight-to-the-death battles to prevent the Willits bypass? It’s a proud memory for the dullards who protested the bypass, and they’d organize to prevent an extra lane going anywhere, even if it saved their neighbor’s life.

Thus Highway 101 remains two lanes wide in substantial sections, the same width it’s been for a hundred years, despite California’s population growing a bit during the interim. We’re sitting here stuck with a century-old road, and mired in forest fire protection policies designed by eco-dweebs who are all now 75 years old and don’t even remember what a mess they made of things, or how to spell the word ‘tree.’

Solutions, or steps to be taken, would be to build new lanes north and south so local citizens have a fighting chance of escaping Conflagration 2020 or whenever it sweeps through. Prepare for protests, of course.

Next, bring some common sense back to forest management practices by ridding forests of underbrush and dried vegetation. CalFire can post notices on stumps alerting squirrels and bunnies of impending controlled burns. Prepare for more protests.

Do you suppose our elected representatives will see to it that sensible policies are pursued? I don’t. Dumb Jim Wood is too busy getting his name in the news for heroic actions against Big Tobacco. Squeaky Mike McGuire mostly just likes to visit school classrooms to tell kids about, umm, education and stuff.

But the droughts are not done with us and neither are the fires. We will be ready just like we’re always ready, which means not. When Healdsburg ignites we will talk with our neighbors about controlled burns. When we can only flush our toilets twice a month we will wonder why local and state officials can’t renegotiate the Lake Mendocino water deal with Sonoma County.

Meanwhile, Wood will be waging war with tobacco addicts and McGuire will be standing in a parking lot at Yokayo Elementary.

Thought-free thinking

• The greater the number of bumper stickers on the back of a vehicle the lower the odds of the driver being able to carry on an intelligent conversation.

• Ukiah inviting Costco into town is like trees inviting lumberjacks into the forest.

• Growing up in Ohio we learned no two snowflakes are exactly alike, and in subsequent years I’ve also come to believe no two cornflakes are exactly alike.